Shearman & Sterling has been hit by another senior London departure with M&A partner Jonathan Coppin joining US rival Hogan & Hartson.

Shearman announced his departure internally last Thursday (6 July) and Coppin joined Hogan the following day, becoming the second corporate partner to leave Shearman's London office in recent months, following Adrian Knight's move to Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom last November.

Coppin will be the UK head of corporate at Hogan.

His departure, exclusively revealed on legalweek. com, will be seen as a blow to Shearman, where he has worked on several high-profile transactions since joining from Norton Rose in 2002, including advising Nokia on last month's £13.6bn tie-up between Nokia and Siemens' communication services businesses.

In recent years he has also advised on the £2.3bn sale of 11.5% of Standard Chartered to Temasek, AXA's £3.5bn offer for Guardian Royal Exchange and TXU's £4.5bn bid for the Energy Group.

Peter King, an M&A partner with Shearman, told Legal Week: "We are disappointed he has gone and would rather he had not left, but we have got a thriving practice. It will have an impact in the short term but I would not expect serious losses of clients."

Much of the work that would have gone to Coppin is now being handed over to Coppin's former Norton Rose colleague Lawrence Levy, who joined the US firm earlier this year.

Coppin will be responsible for building up a full City corporate practice with an emphasis on Hogan's core sectors of telecoms, energy, life sciences, transport and real estate.

Coppin told Legal Week: "When you have been doing the job as long as I have, you get an idea about how things should be done, but it is hard to put that into practice in anything other than a start-up. I will initially be the sole dedicated M&A partner and it is my job to create and build the practice."

The move is the latest in a series of Hogan hires. At the beginning of this year the Washington DC based firm hired Lovells' former competition head, John Pheasant, and this week the firm hired the former joint head of SJ Berwin's German practice, Uwe Steininger, as a partner in its Munich office.

Steininger joined the firm on Monday (10 July) and will help lead the German and European expansion of the US firm's private equity and alternative investments practice. He resigned from SJ Berwin, where he was also leader of the German funds practice, late last year.